





Men and Missions 


By 
TALCOTT WILLIAMS, LL.D. 
Editor Philadelphia Press 


An Address at the Annual 
Meeting of the American Board, 
Brooklyn, N. Y., October 15, 1908 


THE AMERICAN BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS 
FOR FOREIGN MISSIONS 
BOSTON 





IMLY we all perceive that missions 
have ceased to be a matter of the in- 
dividual call to convert souls in another land, 
such as stirred our earliest American mis- 
sionary effort. Missions have passed beyond 
the efforts of any communion, much less 
any denomination, to establish its policy 
and enlarge its membership in new lands. 
Missions in our day, in our recent day, have 
passed from their individual and denomi- 
national period and entered on their na- 
tional stage. They have become part of the 
great world forces with which every man, 
believer or not, must reckon. No man can 
put missions aside as negligible. The work 
of missions to-day affects the affairs of na- 
tions, the development of great peoples, 
the solution of racial problems. “Lord, 
turn and overturn,” we have prayed for 
years; and at length, in this latter day, the 
earth shakes with the steps of His coming. 
“Men and missions!’” The day has come, 
and now is, when it 1s more important for 
men that they should be interested in mis- 
sions than that missions should interest men. 
For us, in this American Board meeting, it 
is no longer a question whether the world is 
ready for missions, as when its members 
first gathered a century ago, but whether 
missions are ready for the world... . 
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When the church first began this great 
change thirty years ago —a change whose 
significance none of us understood — the 
first signs of this transformation came in the 
growth from a zeal for conversion to save 
men in the next world, to a new ardor and 
strong desire by widening education to save 
not converts alone, but peoples and nations, 
and prepare them for both worlds. Not one 
of us thirty years ago was wise enough to 
interpret aright this work of the Spirit, 
brooding over the church. We are wiser 
now. We all see that the hour has struck in 
the world’s history when the emphasis and 
accent of missions have changed from the 
salvation of the individual to the redemp- 
tion of nations. Our fathers and our grand- 
sires looked out upon a lost world and 
thought of snatching from it here and there 
a brand plucked from the burning. We see, 
in the forefront of the coming dawn, the 
opportunity, the possibility, the certainty, of 
a redeemed humanity and a transfigured 
world, if we are equal to the duties of the 
hour. Those of my age will remember 
thirty or forty years ago, when this change 
in the emphasis of missions began to shift 
itself from seeking the conversion of the 
individual soul and saving him from a dire 
future, to the determination that nations 
should be converted, and the world as a 
whole should become part of the kingdom 
of God. We remember well the fear there 
was that this shifting of emphasis would 
cut, as some of us were told, “the pocket 


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nerve of missions.”’ Has this come about? 
Were contributions ever larger? Were mis- 
sions ever more in the thoughts of men? 
Did they ever bulk larger in the world’s 
affairs ? 

I appeal to you all, after what you have 
just heard from this platform from our 
Northern neighbor, after what those of you 
know who come from the volunteer move- 
ment in our colleges, and those of you who 
are familiar with the wide foreign field, if it 
is not a fact that the work of missions, which 
was once a question of the planting of indi- 
vidual churches, is not instead now directed 
to the solution of great national issues; so 
that the racial question in Natal will never 
be settled except by the aid of the Ameri- 
can missionary and on his principles; so 
that the future of the government of the 
Congo and the present changes have rested 
on the testimony of missionaries; and 
through India it is plain that unless educa- 
tion be placed upon the moral basis upon 
which missions place education, those who 
build the higher education of 300,000,000 
have but sapped the foundations of order; 
for of no house is it so true that unless the 
Lord build the house they labor in vain who 
build it, as of the House of Knowledge. 
And so, the world around, judgment is ut- 
tered on the works of men by the work of 
missions. 

Last of all, and most of all, how each of 
us in this Pentecostal year is stirred by the 
strange resurrection of the land of my birth 


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and my boyhood —the sudden presence 
among the free nations of the world of a free 
Turkey! Many causes have combined, many 
factors are present, many influences have 
turned the hearts of men through that em- 
pire; but if we ask ourselves what the gov- 
erning and final factor is which has brought 
about the first of the world’s bloodless rev- 
olutions, which has seen a people divided and 
dissevered by creed, by race, by language, 
by every conceivable difference which can 
separate the sons and daughters of men, 
suddenly act together — we do ill if we for- 
get that for eighty years the American mis- 
sionary, and most of all the missionaries of 
the American Board, have been laying the 
foundations and preaching the doctrine 
which make free government possible. Be- 
hold there those first two words: Liberty 
and Justice*, in the national colors of Tur- 
key, but yesterday the colors of despotism, 
and to-day the bright colors of freedom and 
the constitutional law. Where do “ Free- 
dom and Justice’? come from, except from 
the teaching of the American missionary ? 

For eighty years present in Turkey, our 
missionaries, men and women, who have 
taught in various schools and colleges, who 
have been called of their Lord to the work 
of missions in city and village, in road and 
field, have been dotted over Turkey — four, 
five, six, hundred; just as many, my friends 
iN missions, as our contributions permitted 

*The new Turkish motto: ‘* Liberty, justice, and equality,” hung 
in red and white at the side of the platform. 


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the Board to send — dotted over Turkey, 
daily the unconscious apostles of liberty and 
self-government. Myself a boy in a mission- 
ary’s house — and I appeal to every mis- 
sionary’s son here from Turkey if he has not 
like memories ?— I remember when, through 
long hot afternoons in Mosul, through 
rainy and foggy days in Mardin, through 
dark hours in the black city of Diarbekr, 
through days upon the mountain outlook of 
Harpoot, in village roadside khan and in the 
village Kehia’s house, the perpetual ques- 
tion which arose in every conversation, and 
which was asked in every call by a Turkish 
official, by merchant and peasant, villager 
and townsman, by Armenian or Jacobite ec- 
clesiastics, by newly found converts, by 
Moslems coming timidly to find the truth, 
was not merely in regard to the truth in 
Christ Jesus, but also concerning that mar- 
vel and miracle by which a nation existed 
without a king and ruled itself without des- 
potism. Do you imagine that that has gone 
on for eighty years in every Turkish city, 
with every sermon and with all the teaching 
and training soaked and permeated with the 
spirit of American liberty and the love of 
American justice and the hatred of oppres- 
sion, without gradually leavening the whole 
lump ? 

You will find scattered through diplomatic 
dispatches — sometimes even in our own 
— the suggestion that the missionary “makes 
trouble.”” When a man who loves justice 
and righteousness finds before him oppres- 


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sion and wrong it is his business to make 
trouble. He is there to plant the seeds which, 
when they grow, will make endless trouble 
and end the wrongs about him. Those 
seeds were planted in Turkey, and it came 
to pass, when the hour was struck and men 
found themselves face to face with liberty, 
that they were the first of earth’s peoples 
in all western Europe and Asia who knew 
the difference between liberty and license. 
And that lesson they had learned from the 
missionaries of this Board. The leaders of 
new Turkey were the first who headed a 
revolution with the determination that there 
should be no period of riot betweeen the dis- 
charge of a sultan and the entrance of a con- 
stitution and a parliament. ‘They had 
learned, from the historical lessons taught 
by American missionaries in college and 
school and still more in daily conversation, 
that it was possible for a great people to as- 
sociate itself together for self-government 
and lose no single life in the attempt. . . . 
And this amazing change and miracle in 
our latter days brings us face to face with 
the great fact which, as I have said, makes 
it more necessary that men should be inter- 
ested in missions than that missions should 
be interesting to men; namely, that more 
than has been done in Turkey would have 
been done elsewhere if we had been equal to 
our opportunity. I ask those here — some 
of whom I remember well in college before 
they went out to fruitful years in Japan — 
what would have been the result if, half a 


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century ago, the Christian church had awak- 
ened to its opportunity as Japan opened?... 

But in China the opportunity still remains. 
There is a great nation, comprising a quarter 
of the human race, at the very moment, as 
Turkey was seventy years ago, of passing 
from provincial government to an organized 
centralization; at the very instant and epoch 
in its fortunes where Japan was forty years 
ago, when Western knowledge first began to 
be accepted; at that very moment of leaven- 
ing and of yeasting when nations are sud- 
denly aware that their past has betrayed 
them and that they must look forward to a 
new future and a new learning. If we are 
wise in this present hour of our opportunity 
and follow what has been done and taught us 
by the recent past, then we shall fill China 
as Japan might have been filled forty years 
ago. Had it been we should not have had, 
as we have to-day, a nation which in science 
equals any of us, which in fighting-power 
surpasses all but one or two races, which 
handles with equal ease the battleship and 
the mine, the art and the literature of its 
past, and the warlike teaching of our own 
day, but which rests its national life on an 
ethics whose sum and teaching is in Bushido. 
I spoke of it with praise to a young man 
born of a mingled American and Japanese 
strain, aware of the traditions of both great 
nations from which he took his descent, and 
he said to me, this young man of nineteen or 
twenty, in words which I have not forgotten 
and which no one here will forget after I have 


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repeated them: “Bushido? I know you ad- 
mire it in the West, but you do not seem to 
understand that there is nothing in Bushido 
which makes it necessary that a man should 
be truthful to men or true to a woman.” 
Upon some such basis, resting on ethics 
which recognize all the wider and deeper 
relations of life but have not risen to the 
high-water mark of Christian ethics, that 
nation has founded its future, its growth, and 
its development. 

“Men and Missions?’’ ‘The question of 
the future is whether the men of the world 
shall be converted by missions to Christian 
ethics before nation after nation, after a pe- 
riod of unparalleled opportunity, has set- 
tled, as Japan has, upon the lees of its an- 
cestors and found in ancient faiths its re- 
ligious feeling and desire. This is the issue 
which must stir the heart of every man who 
looks out upon the field of missions; for the 
question of the future is whether the world 
is to move in one direction or another. 

Now, let me suggest that this view neither 
minimizes the salvation of souls or forgets 
the chief work of missions. The Christian 
dispensation came in that fulness of time 
when Providence had made ready the Roman 
Empire and made forcible the great change 
from the narrow individualism of the syn- 
agogue to the broad humanity of the church. 
The way was prepared, and it is our duty to 
prepare a like way when nations are drawing 
together early to reach the truth, or to see it 
only after long wandering. 


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Now, as in the fourth century, the world 
of civilization which knows Christianity 
faces gathering changes without. Under 
Constantine, the Roman Empire still stood 
secure in all its boundaries. It lay safe, 
powerful, and at rest, from the wall of Severn 
to the walls of Dora; from the Rhine and 
Danube to the African Legion that looked 
from the southern passes of the Atlas on the 
Sahara and its swarming tribes. But with- 
out new dangers were seen, new perils had 
appeared to all the world of the Mediter- 
ranean, and for the first time in four cen- 
turies there were strange armies hanging on 
northern and southern boundaries equal to 
the defeat of the legion’s ordered line. Nor 
less has our own day seen the first army 
outside of our Christian civilization equal 
to great victories and a valor greater than 
victories. I have no fear of the “ Yellow 
Peril’? marshaled by men who predict the 
coming shock of the East and the West. Of 
Asian birth, I know the East too well. But 
there are other perils in this day of free com- 
munication greater than those of war, and 
cutting deeper than the sword. Civilized 
the world will be; but is that civilization to 
be Christian or non-Christian, resting on 
faith and freedom or on tradition and au- 
thority ? 

Let us heed the solemn warning across the 
ages of the church of the fourth century. 
Imagine what would have been if the Nicene 
Council, when for the last time the garment 
of Christ was seen unrent and all Christen- 


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dom sat together, had done its duty, and, 
instead of disputing upon dogma and divi- 
ding on doctrine, had become a great mis- 
sionary assembly, and felt upon miter and 
imperial circlet the Pentecostal flame. Sup- 
pose, only suppose, that the great council, 
whose supreme ability no student of history 
can doubt, had done its full missionary 
duty, and the northern and southern nations 
had been converted before, instead of after, 
the conquest of the Roman Empire. Sup- 
pose Arabia had known a missionary Christ 
before Mohammed, and that Saxon on the 
Elbe, and Frank beyond the Rhine, and 
Goth below the two rivers, had heard the 
Gospel in the fourth century instead of the 
sixth, seventh, and eighth. Is it not possi- 
ble that a thousand years of wasted history, 
which have cast over more than three-quar- 
ters of the Christian church the cloud of 
superstition, would have been saved if the 
church of the fourth century had been a mis- 
sionary church, looking without instead of 
within ? 

We stand at this moment on the thresh- 
old of a new era. When Christ in that last 
command, having begun by calling indi- 
viduals by Galilee, on the Mount turned to 
his assembled church and told them, no 
longer speaking of individuals, to “teach all 
nations,” He saw the nations of the world 
open to the new evangel. And we in like 
manner see all nations open; the possibility, 
if men do their duty by missions, that the 
church in this twentieth century shall do 


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what it failed to do in the fourth century, 
and shall convert, not individuals, but na- 
tions in the hour of their opportunity and 
before the hour of their power. 

And if there be, as I do not think there 
can be, any doubt or question in our minds 
that this work can be done by missions, let 
us not forget that in our day the roll of mar- 
tyrdom, long sealed, has been opened again, 
and that souls — that some of us knew as 
children, in whose families we have sat — 
have been added to that great multitude be- 
low the throne and the altar of God, crying, 
“O Lord, how long!’’ If there be any 
moment when we have given ear and heed 
to the gibe that there were rice Christians in 
China and paid Protestants in Turkey, let 
us remember that long roll of martyrdom; 
nor forget that while the primitive church 
in every century faced the question of great 
multitudes who had denied the faith and 
whose status had to be considered after each 
persecution, in this latter day the church 
of Christ has known so few who denied it 
that none of us think of the question which 
rent the early, primitive church. Instead, 
that roll of martyrs has been filled again and 
again by all who were gathered in a congrega- 
tion. Intwo nations they have been assembled 
by thousands, and tens of thousands; and in 
this opening century, when Turkey is born in 
a day, when we see plainly the error we made 
in Japan, when China is open to the leaven of 
the gospel, when the future of India depends 
on Christian education and the problem of the 


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Dark Continent will only be solved by treat- 
ing racial differences from the missionary 
and Christian standpoint, let us at least, 
men and women, make certain that that 
seed of the church corn, sown in this, our 
day, in suffering ignominy and death, shall 
grow in God’s good providence, watered by | 
our tears and contributions, until it shall 
shake like the cedars of Lebanon and the 
fruit thereof shall fill the whole earth. 


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American Board of Commissioners 
for Foreign Missions 


Offices: 
CONGREGATIONAL HOUSE, BOSTON 
14 BEACON STREET 
Cable Address, ‘‘Fernstalk, Boston’”’ 


Telephones: 


Secretaries and Treasurer, 608 Haymarket 
Publishing and Purchasing Department, 2181 Haymarket 


President 
SAMUEL B. CAPEN 


Vice-President 
Rev. HENRY C. KING 


Prudential Committee 
THE PRESIDENT and VICE-PRESIDENT, ex officsis 
CHARLES A. HOPKINS 
Rev. ARTHUR L. GILLETT 
FRANCIS O. WINSLOW 
Rev. JOHN H. DENISON 
Rev. EDWARD M. NOYES 
HERBERT A. WILDER 
ARTHUR H. WELLMAN 
Rev. ALBERT PARKER FITCH 
HENRY H. PROCTOR 
Rev. GEORGE A. HALL 
ARTHUR PERRY 
Rev. LUCIUS H. THAYER 


Secretaries for Correspondence 
Rev. JAMES L. BARTON Rev. CORNELIUS H. PATTON 


Recording Secretary 
Rev. HENRY A. STIMSON 


Treasurer 
FRANK H. WIGGIN 


Secretary Emeritus 
Rev. ELNATHAN E. STRONG 


Editorial Secretary 
Rev. WILLIAM E. STRONG 


Assistant Secretary 
Rev. ENOCH F. BELL 


Auditors 
EDWIN H. BAKER WILLIAM B. PLUNKETT 
HERBERT J. WELLS 


Publishing and Purchasing Agent 
JOHN G. HOSMER 


District Secretaries 


Rev. CHARLES C. CREEGAN 
287 Fourth Avenue, Room 818, New York City 


Rev. A. N. HITCHCOCK 
153 La Salle Street, Chicago, IIl. 


Rev. H. MELVILLE TENNEY 
Barker Block, Berkeley, Cal. 


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